“Heat assisted magnetic recording,” optical assisted recording or thermal assisted recording (collectively hereinafter HAMR), generally refers to the concept of locally heating a recording medium to reduce the coercivity of the recording medium so that an applied magnetic writing field can more easily affect magnetization of the recording medium during a temporary magnetic softening of the recording medium caused by the local heating. HAMR allows for the use of small grain media, which is desirable for recording at increased areal densities, with a larger magnetic anisotropy at room temperature assuring a sufficient thermal stability. HAMR can be applied to any type of storage media, including for example, tilted media, longitudinal media, perpendicular media, and/or patterned media.
When applying a heat or light source to the magnetic medium, it is desirable to confine the heat or light to a track where writing is taking place and to generate the write field in close proximity to where the magnetic medium is heated to accomplish high areal density recording. In addition, one of the technological hurdles to overcome is to provide an efficient technique for delivering large amounts of light power to the recording medium confined to sufficiently small optical spots.
One way to achieve tiny confined hot spots is to use a near-field transducer, such as a plasmonic optical antenna or an aperture, integrated in a waveguide. Light propagating in the waveguide is focused by a focusing element, such as a planar solid immersion mirror into the near-field transducer. However, one of the challenges is to direct the light into the waveguide in a slider associated with the magnetic recording head with low cost, good alignment tolerance, and high light delivery efficiency. Systems and methods for achieving laser-in-slider light delivery are disclosed herein.